The Teesra

Category: cricket

  • It’s too easy..

    Interesting conversation with a parent after one of my sessions last week.

    We had been working on hitting front foot drives, and had finished with a game, with bobble feeds from the coach – making it “too easy” for the players to hit the ball.

    As I explained to the parent, just about the only way for a batter to strike a low bouncing (almost rolling) delivery back towards the feeder is with a vertical bat – the feed forced the batsmen to approximate the front foot drive, rather than just hitting the ball anyhow.

    A perfectly reasonable question…I probably should make a point of explaining some of the “madness” to the parents, in future.

  • Making sense of games with Principles of Play

    I have posted previously on my conversion to games-based learning, and on the challenges of designing games that are both “representative” (of the real game, and that therefore require the players to develop transferable cricket skills) but at the same time not so constrained and artificial as to no longer be fun to play (the “game” element is important, because we want the players to come back to it again and again). (more…)

  • “Running two” – a modified fielding practice that also develops batting stroke placement and decision making.

    Back in the summer, one of the teams I coached was having problems picking up singles and twos – their innings progressed by a succession of big hits and run outs – so we developed a game to practice shot placement and decision making.

    I called it “run 1, run 2”, because that is what I kept calling out to the batsmen, but you might come up with a better name!

    Try it, though – we found that the results were encouraging, and, as with many games, the tactical challenges were as interesting as the technical.

    (more…)